Tenderness
by Love's Labour's Won
Summary: What was within him—he who loved the weak grasp of prey, the tender flesh of one who could love because she could be hurt? Why was he who was so strong so very weak? Slight unnamed Pred/Human; birth of a Bad Blood. Oneshot.


Disclaimer: I do not own Predator, Alien, or any of the characters and likenesses thereof. This is a fan-made work created purely for entertainment, and I am not in any way affiliated with the author or publishers. In other words: It's not mine! I'm just having fun with it!

A/N: This is my first fanfic for this fandom, and I am no expert on Yautja, only having seen AvP at this point. However, they are a fascinating race, and I hope that I have done them justice in some capacity.

* * *

He could not find her. Where was she? Panic rose unbidden to his chest, tightening and chilling his very essence. He crashed through the jungle gracelessly, throwing caution to the wind in his haste. Vines tripped him and thorns lashed him, but he felt them not at all. Where was she? He could not find her.

A dainty foot unhidden by the giant tree he rested against alerted him to her presence.

* * *

Since the earliest years he could remember, the hunter had always had an affinity for weak things. Soft, slender, fragile things. Fuzzy things with curly fur that kept them warm on cold planets. Lithe things with tiny muscles built for speed, not strength. Little things that curled into his bedroll at night. And they always came to him.

That power lay not in strength or agility, brutality or grace. There were many among his people who were stronger and more agile and more brutal and more graceful. They were always met with flight. He knew the power of gentleness, and he always wondered why his people did not.

Once, when he was very young, he had captured a nameless thing in the vegetation behind his mother's dwelling. He had never known what it was, but he had fed it his portion for that evening, stroking its tiny furry head with his claws as gently as he could manage, listening to its comfortable, throaty chitters and the minute clacks of its little claws. It had never fought him, never hurt him, and so he sat for hours with it, safe and unnoticed in the mist.

He had been very sad when at last the time had forced him to let it go, and he had never told anyone about it. Even at such a young age, he knew that the machismo with which he was surrounded precluded any understanding on the others' parts of something soft and gentle, for even his mother, bouncing him on her knee, could only brag of what a grand, merciless hunter he was to become.

Nonetheless, he had wept privately from then on whenever he saw a tiny skull clenched in another child's fist.

* * *

He called to her, clicks blending with rough vowels as he formed words in her language that he hoped she would hear. He did not wish her to fear him, no matter how she did.

"Why did you run?" She was in no condition to run, no condition at all. He was almost angry with her, but he remembered what his party had done to her mate earlier in the hunt.

A soft groan was his only response.

* * *

He remembered his first kill as a blur of claws and fur and terror, much as he suspected the rest did their own. He never spoke of it, of course, but the weakness was there in him and in everyone. Why, then, was it never acknowledged?

The elders spoke of fear as a tool, a weapon to be sharpened until it was no longer fear but an excitement that drove the doer of bloody deeds into a frenzy of delight. He knew that it was true, but he often wondered what value the emotion had in its own right. It was not pleasant, to be sure, but it was real and it was raw, unrefined in its glory, a spike that chilled and thrilled him in the dead of the night when unknown noises filtered into his sleeping mind.

Nonetheless, he grew and learned the ways of his people, and his secret love of what he felt when he slew something terrifying combined with his hidden need for softness to ironically make him a better hunter.

* * *

She moaned again, and his heart flew into his mouth. Such pain in such a simple utterance… what had they done to her? Why? Only bad bloods killed women who could not defend themselves. Rage boiled within him, and he had not yet even seen her.

He walked around the tree to join her and was frozen, slain by the fact that there was only one thing he could do for her now.

* * *

She had been small and weak. He had known that the moment he detected her heat signature. The code of honor had dictated that he should leave her alone, but something had twinged inside him—she had shaken at his approach, for he had been near. He had felt a sense of gentle interest he had never felt around anything since that one day when he was young. Gentleness, tenderness, sweet and soft and weak…

He had helped her to her feet, and something inside him had made him look into her eyes. There, he had seen what he sought. Fear and weakness and jarring terror, embodied in a soft, vulnerable shell. Such imperfection. So beautiful.

He had known that the others would not understand, and so he had hidden her, gently stroking her quaking form to sleep. So lovely, so soft, sending tremors of emotion through him into the night. He had held his hand over her belly, feeling the warmth within it.

The others had called him, and he had come, returning only to feed and comfort her as his people struck hers down. It was wonderful, so beautiful, the way she had nestled into his chest. The food was difficult for her to stomach, but he would not let her refuse it. She would live, his pretty, tender thing. She would.

* * *

He held her again, warm red liquid dripping down his body as he shook with an emotion he had never felt so strongly—a feeling that was not hatred, that did not burn but stabbed with a dull knife's pain.

His people had not been the cause of this. He had not. No one had, no one but the one inside her, an even he could not be blamed. The little one lay cold within her, and the blood that pooled about the two as she shuddered softly in death's skeletal arms would only be warm for a few minutes longer. His entire world shuddered with her.

What was within him—he who loved the weak grasp of prey, the tender flesh of one who could love because she could be hurt? Why was he who was so strong so very weak? What did he seek in the forbidden nuances of the touch of something he could break in half without a thought?

His people hated it, this thing that lived inside him. They warned against its siren song. Why had he always indulged its whims, allowing it to kill within him what made him worthwhile?

No more.

No more.

No more softness, no more frailty. No more tender flesh that trembled at his touch. No more care. No more mercy, for now he knew.

The only way to love is to be weak, and it is this weakness that kills us in the end.

On the next hunt, he killed everything in his path without a thought, and when his hunting companions objected, they also met his blades.

* * *

A/N: Please review! ^_^


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